Dolores Fuller

Dolores Fuller, who died on May 9 in Las Vegas aged 88, was the muse and
girlfriend of Ed Wood, the screenwriter and director responsible for films
such as Bride of the Monster, Jail Bait and The Sinister Urge; in 1980 — two
years after his death — he won the accolade “Worst Director of all Time”.

Dolores Fuller (complete with her famous angora sweater) and Ed Wood in 'Glen or Glenda'Photo: ALAMY

5:45PM BST 13 May 2011

There were those who considered that Dolores Fuller was his equal in the acting department. Her most notable role was in Wood’s picture about cross-dressing and transsexuality, Glen or Glenda (1953), which has become something of a cult classic.

She also starred in Wood’s Jail Bait (1954), alongside the bodybuilder Steve Reeves, and had a role in Bride of the Monster (1955), in which a mad scientist kidnaps 12 men with a view to turning them into supermen by using atomic energy; the scientist was played by the former Dracula star Bela Lugosi, a fixture in many of Wood’s films.

Dolores Fuller was much more successful as a lyricist, writing the words to a number of songs performed by Elvis Presley in his films, including Rock-a-Hula Baby for Blue Hawaii (1961). She also penned lyrics for Peggy Lee.

She was born Dolores Eble at South Bend, Indiana, on March 10 1923, but at an early age was taken by her mother to live in Hollywood. Her first venture on to the big screen came at the age of 10, when she made a fleeting appearance in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Asked in later life what she remembered of the great star of Gone With the Wind, she confided: “He had very bad breath and would munch on peppermints.”

On leaving high school, Dolores auditioned for parts in early television dramas. “I did the tours of movie studios in heavy make-up and my mother’s fur coat trying to look older than my years,” she recalled. Her break, if such it was, came when she was introduced to Wood in a Hollywood restaurant and immediately fell in love. “He was completely devoted to me,” she said, “and by casting me as his leading lady wanted me to make it big in the movies. His dressing up didn’t bother me — we all have our little queer habits.”

Wood liked to wear Dolores’s clothes — most famously her white angora sweater, which he featured in Glen or Glenda. She stored the sweater in a freezer and continued to wear it when she appeared at film conventions across America.

She gave up acting in the late 1950s and went on to found her own record company, Dee Dee Records, helping to launch the careers of Johnny Rivers and Tanya Tucker.

Dolores Fuller was portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker in the 1994 biopic Ed Wood, directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Wood. She declined an offer to make a cameo appearance, and made no secret of her dislike of the film. Towards the end of her life she appeared in two films released on video: The Ironbound Vampire (1997) and The Corpse Grinders 2 (2000).

In 2008 she published an autobiography, A Fuller Life: Hollywood, Ed Wood and Me, co-written with Stone Wallace and her husband, Philip Chamberlin.

To the end she defended her former lover’s reputation: “The films may have been as cheesy as hell, but they have made a mint in sales on video and DVD. Today I believe Eddie would look at his cult position in film history and smile widely.”